


vae victis

by thenewlondoner (muleumpyo)



Category: Hereditary (2018)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-10 15:43:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18663367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muleumpyo/pseuds/thenewlondoner
Summary: Woe to the conquered.Peter is not dead, nor is he alone. Death might have been a blessing in comparison.





	vae victis

 

_The will is a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills; Nor can it choose its rider... the riders contend for its possession._

_Martin Luther_

 

The light arcs. And the pain snaps through.

Light reflects down a dark corridor, illuminates the still, white figures from above. They are lined up in neat rows; equidistant, singular bodies, like trees planted in an orchard, like headstones on an empty field.

Their shadows stretch endlessly across the black hills in that brief flash of light. Pale trunks and skewed legs burrow into the earth, smooth skin gone mottled in the snap of change. They give the brief impression of tangled branches overhead, each body reaching fruitlessly into the dark.

They are, all of them, bare-skinned. Their flesh cuts starkly white against the darkness, paper cutouts of people, carved from the pages by an inelegant hand.

They face away, the bodies. Face away, their backs turned as one. Hundreds of bodies stretching away into the dark. Their feet are turned forward, towards a door at the end of the hall.

He is waiting, with them. In the dark.

The light snaps by again, slides over his eyes and hurtles down the hall to disappear into that door. It is a rising wave of light, a heaving swell pulled to a crest just above him, and it is gone.

He is two feet behind one figure, the same two feet from the next one, and so forth. Two feet each, two by two, echo of footsteps tapping sharp against a wooden floor. One, two.

The light.

The light skates over the space above the still figures, the mass of black shadow where the head should rest. Above the slumped shoulders, there is only darkness rising up. An emptiness above the bared shoulders that does not allow the light to enter it, a conscious void.

None of the figures have a head above their torso, every neck cut cruelly at the base.

A seize of pain-- no, fear.

All down the corridor, the bodies are still in the split-second light, and he sees.

He is closer to the door. No one has moved, time has not changed, and the door is closer.

It is not closed completely. A thin band of light cuts through the space between the door and frame and arrows across the floor.

Beneath them all, it is linoleum, grey and scuffed. It becomes familiar in a stab. The dim hallway is lined by lockers and there at the end, he knows, is a trophy case. A torn poster hangs from the wall next to the door.

Fear reaches a cold fist through the darkness and clutches at his throat, tightens its grip. Ice knifes through his lungs, like coming awake after too long of a sleep. It is worse, now that he knows where he is, and where he is not. He is not in his school, though it looks exactly the same.

The door is closer, the light seeping into the dark hall. There are only a few rows between him and the white line cutting sharply across the floor. No one has gone through the door and there are only a few more bodies between him and that door.

He shouldn't be awake. He shouldn't know this. He is-- he is--

Light lurches over him and he looks down. He feels himself look, head tilting, chin touching his chest. He is not naked, like the others. He is still wearing jeans, an unzipped hoodie, blood-splattered chucks. Dirt stains the knees of his jeans, the front of his shirt.

This is all normal. His clothes, his body. Familiar clothes on a body he used to occupy. His nose fills with the scent of soil.

Suddenly he remembers it all in a sharp pull back through time, film spinning backwards in the projector too fast: the slam of his body onto the ground, the weightless feeling in that brief second of freedom, the shattering of glass, his feet scraping against the wooden floor of the attic, trying to find traction, the blinding terror of looking up and--

He stops.

\--blood raining down on him as if a storm is rolling in. His mother, in a body that she occupied, maybe, hanging from the rafter--

He stops!

\--terror in her eyes, in that body's eyes that was no longer hers, hands at the bloody throat. Silver wire flashing in the faint light.

A choked sob rises in him.

The memory wrestles itself away as he tries to grasp it, to stop it, slippery and wet in his hands as it wriggles free into the darkness, disappears into the light.

Pain arches through him, and it is pain this time. He cannot follow the memory into the light.

He sees his hands rise in front of him, fingers clenched into fists. Slowly, he opens his hands. Between his fingers, light cuts through and blocks the glare from his face. He is so close to the body in front of him, it is inches from his hands.

Between him and the light, there is only one body.

He shoves at it with both hands, stomach recoiling at the sick feeling of cold, hard flesh. But he moves, lunges forward and comes close to that strangely odorless flesh, pushes the body with the weight of his body, a seemingly immovable tree felled, physics in motion.

He expects resistance, thinks of the body remaining in place as if frozen through like the hikers they dig up every spring when the ground thaws and reveals their awkwardly-held bodies, arms stiff and fingers curled up to their throats. He expects a fake body held there by metal stakes driven straight into the ground, or roots twisted up in the earth.

But there is none--the body staggers as if suddenly it has lost its balance, lands hard on one knee. Its hands twitch, almost moving to catch itself, but there's no power in those limbs. It collapses onto the ground with a fleshy sound like meat hitting a metal worktop.

For a second, he is stunned.

Revulsion rises in him, hot in his stomach and boiling up his throat. He spins, shoes squeaking on the linoleum and every moment that passes he comes more awake, his hands are his hands his mouth is his mouth his legs are his own and he moves, he is, is awake, is feeling, is not _dead_.

These bodies, they are the dead. Or close enough.

He is not dead.

He runs down the corridor, away from the light. It is somehow more horrible to see the bodies from the front, to look up and expect to see a face hovering above the shoulders, to only see a void there. They are more real and less at the same time, at once people and the wrecked remains of them.

Nothing moves but him, his footsteps echoing and his breath- his breath!- panting loudly. He runs down the hallway, past the beaten green lockers and closed, darkened doors. There is hardly room for him on the side of the rows, he is within inches of the shoulders of the people.

They do not reach for him as he passes. They do not step in his path, these unpossessed bodies. He puts rows and rows between himself and the lighted door and it should be enough. But he can't see the end of the hall, the serried ranks of bodies. The dead are endless.

The light sparks again from somewhere in the distance. It soars overhead and around, and for a second it blinds him. He misses a step and slams into one of the bodies' shoulder. The body stumbles back a step, arms swinging wide like a top whirling across a wooden floor. It falls at the feet of another body, splayed out without care.

He staggers back, looks at the body on the floor. It is, he _knows_ it is familiar, but he can't stop now.

He runs and runs down the hallway into the dark, the light flashing too quickly for him to see anything but brief images. And then he is in the darkness.

On one side, his hands slam against the metal of the lockers and scrape against posters on the wall, across a closed door. On the other he feels the cold flesh of the dead.

It feels like forever, this movement in the dark. His heart beats so fast he can't feel one beat from another and he is overheated, muscles aching and breath panting and he is going to collapse soon but he can't stop, not while he is alive.

And then like a burst of agony his body feels like it catches flame, all over it burns and he cannot see anything of his skin or his face or his hands and he screams in the soundless space. He feels the scream in his throat. He is dying again and again.

He has gone through the other door, the one that won't be seen.

Just as suddenly, as if he has slammed into earth, the flames stop. His mouth is open and his eyes are closed, he thinks his eyes are closed. He is not burning anymore. It is cool, like spring.

His eyes open. The world around him flares into brilliant color, too much, the cloud-streaked sky and the green stretch of the pine trees on black hills burning into his vision. It is too much and he wants to close his eyes but he cannot.

He cannot move. He can see with eyes and breathe with a mouth and lungs, but he is not doing these things. They are being done around him, _through_ him.

Then, as if someone else were moving for him, a hand-- his hand-- comes into view. It is lifted and it rubs across his mouth and he can taste the faint hint of earth and something burnt.

His body moves without him, breathing in and out. His eyes blink, and he shakes his head but it is something else, someone else who does this.

"Oh, you couldn't stay away, could you, Peter?" his voice asks the open air, a hint of humor to it that is not _his_. "You want to see the end of it?" his voice asks and he knows it is aware he cannot move his own mouth, cannot make himself speak in answer.

He is trapped.

He is not the only thing inside this body.

This body, it is not his anymore to inhabit, to be. He does not possess it, though he is possessed by it, by the creature or the mind or the demon or the spirit that now has his body and operates it like it is its own. He follows its movements like a particularly pitiful shadow, breaths rising and falling, and he is made to do these things in a body he recognizes, cruelly against his volition.

It is someone else's body, now.

He is the visitor, the unwanted presence.

In desperation that he knows but can't feel, he struggles against this idea because this is his body, this is who he _is_ , he should control _his own body_ \-- but though the idea of agony riots through his mind and the shadow of a scream rises in the memory of his throat, it is useless. It is fighting a winter storm crashing over the mountain, fighting a river as it pulls you inextricably under, it is drowning and senseless and will never be won.

"You'll see," his voice says. Not-his-body moves, turning his gaze from the cut-out shadow line of the horizon, to the car pulled over to the side of the road.

He recognizes the woman in the passenger seat of the SUV in a way that is not his recognizance, but he knows her, feels connected to her. There is a flash of memory lighting up his mind, blood-soaked wood, white cotton, paper crinkling and unfolding, and then it darts away again. That is not his memory.

"There is much to be done," his voice says with a grin that pulls his cheeks up too high, too wide. His body walks back towards the car and as the tinted windows come closer he knows with horrible certainty what he will see.

A face that was once Peter's but is no longer.

His face worn by another, grinning back at the shadow of him trapped, eyes alight.

He will not see himself, not there.

Not ever again.

 


End file.
